This collection of hitherto unpublished and unedited reports, memos and jottings were sent to me by the indefatigable historian of the anti-Francoist guerrillas in Spain, Antonio Téllez (1921–2005), prior to his death. They were intended to provide the basis for his ongoing investigation into the treachery, malfeasance, chicanery, incompetence and litany of failures of the Toulouse-based executive committees of the Spanish Libertarian Movement in Exile (CNT-FAI-FIJL). There had been, he was convinced, treachery and betrayal on a grand scale that, from 1947 until the mid 1950s, had led to the arrest, torture, imprisonment, murder and execution of many brave men, including close friends of his, urban and rural guerrillas as well as CNT militants involved in clandestine propaganda, intelligence gathering and organisational work inside Spain. At the very least the reader comes away better informed about the existence of so many questions as to the roles of X, Y and Z, rather than being able to answer the serious questions raised; to actually identify the traitors and informers by name would require access to the Toulouse MLE-CNT archives, as well as to those of the French and Spanish police, intelligence and security services — an unlikely scenario. (Some of the questions raised by Téllez are, however, addressed in some detail in volume 3 of the novel ¡Pistoleros! The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg.)

Téllez’s document is divided into three parts. The first deals with the leadership and the elaborate and complicated nature of the immediate post-war (WWII) MLE-CNT in Exile, up until 1949 (representing approximately 24,000 affiliates). The organisation was under the tight control of its National Committee in France and its International Commission. Both of these bodies were led by the same Ssecretary-general, Germinal Esgleas Jaume, under the considerable influence of his partner Federica Montseny.

From November 1947 onward the Franco government’s security services (the Brigada Politico-Social and the Guardia Civil Anti-Guerrilla Brigade) unleashed a massive repression against the regrouped Libertarian Movement (CNT-FAI-FIJL) within Spain itself. This resulted in many arrests and deaths; national and regional committees of the CNT of the interior fell regularly. Part two of the document deals with the guerrilla and ‘conspiratorial’ groups sent into Aragon and Catalonia by the CNT’s Defence Commission led by its Coordination Secretary, José Pascual Palacios. The third section deals with the Toulouse-based MLE-in-Exile’s leadership and the arrests in Spain from 1950 onward.

Translated extracts from the memoirs of Luis Andrés Edo, an anarchist activist whose life was dedicated to the ‘Idea’ and the struggle for liberty. Throughout his life Luis Andrés Edo remained always both an untiring activist and an intellectual dynamo of the international libertarian movement, constantly provoking thought and developing new anti-authoritarian ideas. His was the voice — the conscience if you like — of what he was proud to call ‘the Apache sector’, defending the anarchist principles of the CNT and fighting untiringly for the restoration of the union’s property and assets seized by the Francoists in 1939, and for justice for the victims of Francoism, particularly the cases of Delgado and Granado the two young anarchists garrotted in 1963 for a crime of which they were innocent. And for at least two generations of young Spanish anarchists who came into contact with him, Luis Andrés Edo was undoubtedly the inspirational role model of the post-Francoist era. From the 1950s until his death in 2009, Edo was to the libertarian movement what Jean Moulin was to the French Resistance. We have only translated four chapters, but should our financial circumstance improve we’ll translate the whole book — a unique and compelling insight into the activities (and shortcomings) of the CNT-in-exile and the wider Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE).

Chapter 2 — The War/Revolution: The CENU; The Battle of Barcelona; The Barricade as Revolutionary Structure; May ’37; Historical notes; The Iron Column; The “Ortiz Case”; The Fall of Barcelona

Chapter 4: — Exile: My First Time Deserting from the Army; Sombernon: The Great Electrical Transformer; First Contact with José Cano Flores; On the Building Squad with Miguel ‘Ferrer’ (Miguel García García); House-building in Épinal (Vosges); Moscardó in Paris and the Big Crackdown in Barcelona (October 1949); The Lyon Station Hold-up; I Join the Big ‘Gillette-Thaon’ Concern; First Clandestine Trip to Barcelona (1951); Arrested on the Figueres to Gerona Leg (1952); A Prisoner in Figueres Castle; Deserting the Army a Second Time (1954)

Chapter 5 — Arrival in Paris: I Discover the Laureano Cerrada ‘Affair’; First Contacts with the Libertarian Youth and with Lucio Urtubia; Assemblyism: I Discover the Mediterranean in Paris; Launching the Clichy Local Libertarian Youth Federation; Contacts with Quico; Contacts with Laureano Cerrada; The End of Quico and his Group; Pascual Palacios: A “Fourth Dimension”; The ‘Sinking’ Operation Coordinated by Pascual Palacios; The Congress of Limoges, 1960

With the death of Luis Andrés Edo, aged 83, in Barcelona, the anarchist movement has lost an outstanding militant and original thinker, and I have lost a comrade-in-arms, a former cell-mate – and an irreplaceable friend. The son of a Guardia Civil, Luis was born in the benemérita barracks in Caspe (Zaragoza) in 1925, but the family moved to Barcelona the following year when his father, Román, was transferred to a new cuartel in the Sants district of Barcelona, where the young boy grew up, educated by nuns, monks and priests. Later, after the social revolution of July 19 1936, the ten-year old Luis became not only a ‘child of the barricades’, but also a ‘son of the CENU’ (el Consell de l’Escola Nova Unificada), the successor rationalist schools to the Modern School launched by Francisco Ferrer I Guardia in 1901 (and forced to close in 1906). The education he received there and on the streets of revolutionary Barcelona was to prove life-changing. Luis’s working life began in 1939, at the age of 14, cleaning machinery and odd-jobbing with Spain’s National Railway company, RENFE, where he was apprenticed two years later as a locomotive engineer and, in 1941, aged 16, he affiliated to the underground anarcho-syndicalist labour union, the National Confederation of Labour (CNT). He remained with RENFE until 1946 when, after completing his apprenticeship at the age of 21, he was arrested and spent a short time in prison accused of ‘stealing potatoes’ from trains as part of the CNT’s ‘ food redistribution’ campaign during those years of terrible hunger. On his release he became a glassworker, manufacturing thermometers, a job that was to cause him serious and enduring health problems from ingesting mercury and hydrofluoric acid.

Luis was called up in October 1947 to do his National Service, but by December he had had enough of Franco’s army and deserted, crossing clandestinely into France, still dressed in his military uniform. In 1952 he returned to Barcelona following a serious crackdown by the French authorities on the activities of the CNT in exile. This was the result of a bungled train robbery in Lyon the previous year in which three people were killed and nine others injured. Luis was not involved in the Lyon robbery, but the French police went out of their way to make life intolerable for all Spanish anarchist exiles at the time. Back in Spain Luis was arrested on desertion charges in August 1952 and was not freed until October 1953 when he was returned to the ranks — promptly deserting again early in 1954. Re-arrested, he served a further six months in the dungeons of the notorious Castillo de Figueres, a military prison in Gerona, after which, like so many others, he went into permanent exile in France where he threw himself whole-heartedly into the libertarian anti-Francoist resistance movement. In Paris in 1955, Luis became closely involved with Laureano Cerrada Santos, another former RENFE employee and a key figure in the WWII anti-Nazi Resistance and escape and evasion networks. Cerrada was also a master forger and an influential figure in France’s criminal demi-monde, especially the Parisian and Marseilles milieux, and was, undoubtedly, one of the most problematic, enigmatic and mysterious figures of the Spanish anarchist diaspora. It was Cerrada who, in 1947, had purchased a powerful US Navy Vedette speedboat used by the CNT’s defence committee to transport arms, propaganda and militants from France into Spain; he also bought the plane used in the aerial attack on Franco’s yacht in San Sebastian in September 1948. After the fallout from the Lyon robbery in 1951, however, Cerrada was expelled and ostracised by the official CNT for ‘bringing the organisation into disrepute’ because of his ‘criminal connections’. Cerrada had, in fact, been in custody in France on forgery charges for a month prior to the Lyon robbery. That cut no ice with the CNT National Committee in exile in Toulouse who wanted rid of all the ‘Apache’ elements in the organisation who threatened the legality of their comfortable existence in France. In Paris, Luis’s involvement with the Juventudes Libertarias, the Spanish anarchist youth organisation also brought him into contact with most of the other well-known ‘faces’ of the anti-Franco Resistance, men such as ‘Quico’ Sabaté, the near-legendary urban guerrilla, and José Pascual Palacios of the CNT’s Defence Commission, the man responsible for coordinating all the action groups operating in Spain and described by Barcelona police chief Eduardo Quintela as Spain’s ‘Public enemy number one’. It was Luis who organised a meeting between ‘el Quico’ and the former Communist Party army general, ‘El Campesino’ at the latter’s request in 1959, shortly before Sabaté’s death at the hands of the Francoist security services. During this time in Paris he worked at the Alhambra Maurice Chevalier Theatre as assistant scene painter to Rafael Aguilera, the famous Andalusian artist from Ronda. What few people knew, however, was that Aguilera — a hero of the Spanish Civil War and the Resistance who had been imprisoned by the Nazis — was also responsible for maintaining an important arms deposit in Paris for CNT Defence Commission. One of these caches was in his workshop in the attic of the Alhambra. When there was no work to be done in the theatre, Edo and Lucio Urtubia, a close friend and a protégé of Quico Sabaté, would clean and oil these weapons. On one dramatic occasion Lucio was conscientiously cleaning an old Mauser pistol when it went off in his hand, almost blowing Luis’s brains out. By the early 1960s Luis was secretary of the Alianza Obrera (CNT-UGT-STV), propaganda secretary of the National Committee of the CNT, secretary of Paris Local Federation of the CNT, secretary general of the Peninsular Committee of the FIJL in Exile, and was closely involved with, among others, Octavio Alberola, García Oliver and Cipriano Mera in the setting up of Defensa Interior, the clandestine section of the Spanish Libertarian Movement in Exile (MLE). The function of Defensa Interior was to plan and implement subversive actions targeting the Francoist regime and to assassinate Franco himself; it was in this role that I first encountered Luis in Paris in 1964, prior to setting off for Madrid with plastic explosives intended for that very purpose.

My next encounter with Luis was two years later, in Carabanchel Prison in Madrid as a result of a betrayal by a police agent, Inocencio Martínez. He and four other comrades were arrested in October 1966 by Franco’s secret police, the Brigada Político-Social (BPS) and accused of planning to kidnap the head of the US armed forces in Spain, Rear Admiral Norman Gillette and, allegedly, the exiled Argentinean politician Juan Perón. He was also accused of complicity in the Rome kidnapping, six months earlier, of Monsignor Marcos Ussiá, the 40-year old Spanish ecclesiastical attaché to the Vatican. These actions were carried out under the auspices of the First of May Group, the autonomous international anarchist action group, which succeeded Defensa Interior following its dissolution by the CNT-FAI’s Toulouse leadership subsequent to my arrest in 1964.

Luis and I shared a cell in the infamous sixth gallery of Carabanchel, the political wing. I had just turned twenty at the time and in fact it was he who first taught me how to shave. During that time we became close friends as well as comrades. I often recall, with pleasure, the lengthy discussions we had each evening after lock-up until ‘lights-out’ in which we seemed to cover every conceivable subject under the sun. Many of these strands of thought he dedicated to fine onion paper in minuscule hand which we later smuggled out of prison. Some of these theses appeared forty years later in his collection of theoretical essays La Corriente. Certainly, for an inexperienced and naïve youth such as myself, Luis, with his charisma and strong personality was the ideal teacher, mentor, and role model. They were interesting and educational times indeed and involved two escape attempts which were organised by Luis with help from an action group from Paris. The discovery of the plan, just before his trial, led to our separation and my transfer to the penitentiary of Alcalá de Henares in the summer of 1967. Tried by a civil Public Order Tribunal, something unusual in itself for anarchists who, like myself, were normally charged under military law with ‘Banditry and Terrorism’ and tried by a drumhead court-martial, Luis was sentenced to three years imprisonment for illegal association (membership of the Juventudes Libertarias), six years for illegal possession of arms, and a 25,000 peseta fine for possessing false identity documents. The sentence would have been considerably harsher had he been tried by a ‘Council of War’. Luis was released from Jaén prison in 1972, having run the gamut of many of Franco’s maximum security penitentiaries — including Soria and Segovia in which he organised escape committees and mounted a number of hunger strikes and mutinies, for which he spent months in the punishment cells. Arrested again in 1974 on charges of illegal association with the anarchist action groups of the GARI (Grupos de Acción Revolucionaria Internacional) and with complicity in the Paris kidnapping of Spanish banker Baltasar Suárez, Luis received a five-year prison sentence in February 1975 of which he served a little over two years, after being released in 1976 under a royal amnesty during the post-Francoist transition, in spite of having led the first major mutiny during his time in Barcelona’s Model Prison. It was a particularly painful period of imprisonment as he was separated from his partner, Rosita, and his two small children, Helios and Violeta who remained in Paris.

With Franco dead but his cohorts still in the driving seats of power, Luis played a key role in the CNT’s re-construction in Catalonia and was one of the organisers of the ‘Montjuic Meeting’, the first legal public gathering of the CNT since 1939 — an event which attracted 300,000 people, most of them a new generation of young libertarians. He was also a prime mover in organising the ‘Libertarian Days’, the Jornadas Libertarias, a week-long international anarchist festival which followed the Montjuic meeting and, for five extraordinary days in July, turned Barcelona into a international showcase for — and celebration — of anarchism.

But the transition period between 1976 and 1981 was also a time of major provocations by the rump of the Francoist power elite, the Búnker, desperate to hang on to their power and privileges, and avoid being brought to justice for their reign of criminality and terror. They and their new social-democratic partners were also anxious to discredit and neutralise the radical elements of the nascent CNT and the FAI — the so-called ‘Apache sector’. Again it was Luis who was in the forefront of exposing the Spanish State’s ‘Strategy of Tension’, which began in earnest in January 1977 with the massacre of five leftist lawyers in their offices in Atocha and leaving four others seriously injured, by the same Italian neo-fascists responsible for a similar terror campaign under way in Italy since 1968. These terrorists, and other parapoliticals of the SCOE (Servicio de Coordinación, Organización y Enlace), operated under the control of Rodolfo Martín Villa, Adolfo Suárez’s fascist minister of the interior and his notorious police commissioner, Roberto Conesa Escudero. The hands of Martin Villa and Escudero were also to be seen in the Scala fire of 15 January 1978 in which four people died, and the blame for which was laid at the door of the CNT.

Luis was arrested again in 1980 and charged with ‘formación terrorista‘ (organising a terrorist group) — conveniently shortly before the trial of the accused in the Scala case — with the prosecutor asking for a sentence of twenty years, but he was released on provisional liberty in August 1981 after the attempted Tejero coup. The case against Luis was finally dropped in 1984 due to lack of evidence.

In the subsequent twenty five years — right up until the moment of his death, and in spite of a seriously debilitating seven year illness — Luis was supported throughout by his soulmate and partner, Doris Ensinger, with whom he shared his life after finally separating from his first partner, Rosita, in 1981. Luis and Rosita had effectively separated in 1976 when he refused to return to Paris at such a pivotal moment in Spain’s history, while she and the children refused to live in Barcelona. Luis and Doris began their relationship in 1978, living together as a couple from the day he was released from prison in August 1981.

Luis Andrés Edo remained always both an untiring activist and an intellectual dynamo of the international libertarian movement, constantly provoking thought and developing new anti-authoritarian ideas. His was the voice — the conscience if you like — of what he was proud to call ‘the Apache sector’, defending the anarchist principles of the CNT and fighting untiringly for the restoration of the union’s property and assets seized by the Francoists in 1939, and for justice for the victims of Francoism, particularly the cases of Delgado and Granado the two young anarchists garrotted in 1963 for a crime of which they were innocent. And for at least two generations of young Spanish anarchists who came into contact with him, Luis Andrés Edo was undoubtedly the inspirational role model of the post-Francoist era. He was, to the clandestine libertarian anti-Francoist movement, what Jean Moulin was to the French Resistance.

In 2002 Luis published La Corriente, (originally entitled El pensamiento antiautoritario) an anthology of his prison essays in which he explores his ideas on thought and action. and in 2006 he published his autobiographical memoirs: La CNT En La Encrucijada: Aventuras de un Heterodoxo (The CNT at the Crossroads: Adventures of a Maverick) in which he traces the trajectory of his extraordinary life as a militant.

Although Luis Andrés’s death has left those whose lives he touched with a massive sense of regret and loss, he has also left present and future generations a valuable legacy, his memory and his example — Écrasez l’Infâme!

Luis is survived by his partner, Doris Ensinger, and his two children, Helios and Violeta.

Luis Andrés Edo, anarcho-syndicalist, born 7 November 1925; died 14 February 2009.

Sara Berenguer Laosa (Barcelona, 1919 – Montady, Francia, 2010), the daughter of an anarchist militant (Francisco Berenguer, her father, was killed on the Aragon front fighting with ‘Los Aguiluchos’) was a leading figure in the Spanish anarchist ‘Free Women’ movement ‘Mujeres Libres’. After the ‘Events of May 1937’, in which she played a part, she was involved in various industrial committees of the CNT and in the Combatant Section of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA), regularly visiting the front lines. At the end of 1938 she was elected secretary of the regional committee of ‘Mujeres Libres’. After the Francoist victory Sara escaped to France where she was interned for a time by the French. During WWII she and her partner, Jesús Guillén, moved to Bram, near Carcassone, where they were members of the clandestine Resistance groups operating in the ‘Black Mountain’ region. After the Liberation, Sara (who was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur for her role in the Resistance) continued to provide logistical support for the anti-Francoist resistance groups until Franco’s death in 1975, as well as editing ‘Mujeres Libres’.

Captain Raymond Dronne‘s memoir of the regular army unit he commanded from the summer of 1943 to the spring of 1945, No. 9 Company of the Chad March Regiment, also known as ‘La Nueve‘, a company made up almost entirely of Spanish veterans of the civil war and social revolution of 1936-1939 — anarchists, socialists, republicans. It was Dronne’s column that was ordered by General Leclerc to liberate Paris, which it did — flying the Spanish Republican flag from their Sherman tanks and half- tracks — on 24 August 1944. Of the 146 men of ‘La Nueve’ who landed in Normandy, only 16 survived to be the first to enter Hitler’s Berchtesgaden Eagle’s Nest.

They are the heroes from a hidden page of history, the soldiers of ‘La Nueve’, No 9 company of General Leclerc’s renowned 2nd Armoured Division (DB). According to the history books, the liberation of Paris began on 25 August 1944 when General Leclerc’s 2e Division Blindée (2e DB) entered the city via the Porte d’Orléans. In fact, Leclerc began the push earlier, on 24 August, when he ordered Captain Dronne, commander of No 9 Company, to enter Paris without delay. Dronne thrust towards the city centre via the Porte d’Italie at the head of two sections from No 9 Company, better known as ‘La Nueve’.
The first vehicle from ‘La Nueve’ reached the Place d l’Hôtel de Ville on 24 August 1944 shortly after 8.00 p.m., “German time”. Amado Granell – Paris’s very first liberator! – climbed down from his half-track to be greeted inside the city hall by Georges Bidault, president of the National Resistance Council, Jean Moulin’s successor. Granell, like 146 out of the ‘La Nueve’s’ 160 men, was a Spanish republican!
The Battle of Paris cost the 2nd Armoured Division the lives of 71 men and 225 wounded. Material losses included 35 tanks, six self-propelled guns, and 111 vehicles.
On 26 August, General De Gaulle strode down the Champs Élysées accompanied by four vehicles from ‘La Nueve’ acting as his escort and protection detail. The procession was led by Amado Granell and his armoured car.
Survivors of the Spanish Revolution and the civil war against Franco, having enlisted in the Free French army, the Spaniards of ‘La Nueve’ — anarchists, socialists, communists and republicans — went on to liberate Alsace and Lorraine and continued fighting relentlessly into Germany as far as the Nazi heartland in the Obersalzberg in the Bavarian Alps. Of the 146 men who landed in Normandy, only 16 survived to be the first to enter Hitler’s Berchtesgaden Eagle’s Nest.

Evelyn Mesquida has done justice to these heroes of freedom, honouring the pledge she made to the survivors. Journalist and writer Evelyn Mesquida, is honorary chair of the Foreign Press Association in Paris and vice-chair of the European Press Club. She is the author of La Mémoire entre silence et l’oubli. Les soldats oubliés de la libération de Paris (Presses de l’université de Laval, Québec, 2006) and of Sorties de guerre des hommes de ‘la Nueve’ (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008)

We have seen the war powers, which are essential to the preservation of the nation in time of war, exercised broadly after the military exigency had passed and in conditions for which they were never intended, and we may well wonder in view of the precedents now established whether constitutional government as heretofore maintained in this republic could survive another great war even if victoriously waged.

From an address delivered by Charles Evans Hughes at the Harvard Law School, June 21, 1920.

The real traitors to America at present , . . are precisely those false patriots who cry down truth, obstruct the path of social discovery, deny a free forum to Intellectual Honesty, pretend— while storm clouds gather ominously overhead,— that America is a cooing dove of peace and prosperity, a bird of paradise, a harbinger of glad tidings to a world in despair.

From Samuel D. Schmalhausen’s preface to Behold America!, published 1931.

I. Grim Schedule

On June 15, 1947, returning from a state visit to Canada, President Harry Truman stopped en route to view the famous spectacle of Niagara Falls.

For several moments, in pensive silence, Truman contemplated the giant thundering waterfall. Then, thoughtfully, the President said: “I’d sure hate to go over ‘em in a barrel.”

There were, at the time, other problems confronting the American people.

Since the end of the war, the cost of living had continued to soar, with wages lagging far behind. By June 1947, according to Department of Labor statistics, prices had registered an 1 8 percent increase over June 1946. “If the present trends of living costs continue,” warned the New York City Hospital Commissioner, Dr. Edward Bernecker, “there is a grave danger that the health of large segments of our population will deteriorate.” Should food prices climb still higher, said Dr. Bernecker, there would be “a definite increase in the rate of illness in a population weakened by malnutrition.”

Regarding the greatly increased cost of food, Senator Robert A. Taft dryly commented that he agreed with Herbert Hoover that “the best answer is for the people to cut down on their extravagance. They should eat less.”

The housing shortage had reached emergency proportions. Approximately three million American families were sharing their living quarters; hundreds of thousands were desperately searching for places in which to live; more than 20,000,000 people were living in slum areas, shacks and iiretrap tenements; and one-third of all the families in the nation were living in homes lacking minimum standards of decency.

And, as the living standards of the American people declined, the grim schedule of the offensive against their political and economic rights moved inexorably ahead . . .

More than two hundred anti-labor bills were pending in Congress, and one state after another was enacting legislation aimed at undermining the strength of the trade union movement.

In Nebraska, South Dakota, and Arizona, the closed shop was made illegal. Anti-union shop or “right to work” bills were passed in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida and Alabama. Regarding eight anti-labor bills passed by the Texas legislature, the Manufacturers’ Association in that state noted with satisfaction: “The legislature’s action has . . . answered the aims of this organization.”

On June 23, 1947, the United States Congress enacted a law which, in the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, “in one sweeping act aimed at labor’s economic and political power put many of its hard-won rights of more than a decade in a legal straight-jacket.”

Officially designated as the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, and more familiarly known as the Taft-Hartley Law, the new statute virtually nullified the historic National Labor Relations Act. It outlawed the closed shop, industry-wide bargaining, jurisdictional strikes and strikes by Government employees; revived the injunction as a strike-breaking weapon for employers; banned contributions or expenditures by unions for political purposes; and withdrew union rights from any labor union whose officers failed to sign nonCommunist affidavits.

“This bill is not a milk toast bill,” Senator Robert A. Taft, the chief architect of the measure, had remarked during the debate in the Senate on his proposed labor law. “It covers about three quarters of the matters pressed on us very strenuously by employers.”

According to Earl Bunting, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, the new law was “full of benefits” and would bring “a better tomorrow for everybody.”

The New Republic declared:

Fully exploited by anti-labor corporations and fully backed by an anti-labor government, the Taft-Hartley law can destroy trade unionism in America.*

* When the bill was sent to the White House after its initial passage by Congress, Truman had returned it with a 5,500-word veto message characterizing the measure as a “clear threat to the successful working of our democratic society.” But, in the opinion of many, the Chief Executive was only making a politically expedient gesture, with an eye to the 1948 Presidential election. On June 20, the day that Truman’s veto message was made public, the New York Times correspondent, William S. White, reported in a dispatch from Washington that the President “up until this morning had given no visible evidence of the application of White House pressure” to rally his Party forces against the bill. With the overriding of his veto by Congress practically a foregone conclusion, Truman staged a last-minute, highly publicized but completely ineffectual campaign against the measure.

“The Eightieth Congress has reversed the ruinous New Deal trend,” proclaimed a twenty-three page document entitled Republican Congress Delivers, issued in August 1947 by the RepubUcan National Committee as a summary of the accomplishment of the first session of this Congress. “This is a Congress . . . well advanced in its comprehensive program for clearing away the debris left by fourteen long years of New Deal-Democrat misrule . . .”

“The Republican Party has delivered— to big business,” wryly countered Gael Sullivan, executive director of the Democratic National Committee. “It has responded to the will of Wall Street.”

Sullivan, naturally enough, made no mention of the close working alliance that Democratic and Republican congressmen had maintained in supporting the cold war policy of the Truman Doctrine, the President’s inquisitorial loyalty program, increased appropriations for the Un-American Activities Committee, the TaftHartley law, and numerous other measures taken by the Eightieth Congress to wipe out every last vestige of the New Deal.

June 1950, John Service faced loyalty investigations by the State Department and the Senate. Cleared of the charges he was fired in December 1951 on orders of President Truman’s Loyalty Review Board….

“The procedure before the boards,” wrote the attorney, L. A. Nikoloric, in his article, “Our Lawless Loyalty Program,” “violates the provisions of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights. The employe ‘answers’ the charges to his accusers— not to an impartial judge. He is not told where the derogatory information originated; it is impossible to impeach the reliability of its source . . . His only defense is to prove a somewhat nebulous ‘loyal’ state of mind.”

But the “most reprehensible feature of the Loyalty Program,” according to Nikoloric, was “the character of the evidence on which charges are issued.”

The attorney, who had acted as counsel for Government employes in various loyalty proceedings, cited specific cases to illustrate his point. These were some of them:

Miss A. spent one afternoon a week collecting money for Russian War Relief in front of a movie house. She also was instrumental in having Senators Ball and Pepper talk to the people of her city concerning the necessity of accepting Russia as an ally. These events took place in 1943, when the Russians were bearing much of the brunt of the war in Europe. Miss A. also did Red Cross work, collected money and knitted sweaters for British and French War Relief, and spent one night a week at the U. S. O. . . . She was charged on these facts with being disloyal to the United States.

Mr. B. married a girl, who, 10 years before, as a sophomore in college, had been a member of the Young Communist League. The YCL in her school was almost exclusively interested in low-cost dormitory facilities and in higher pay for scholarship jobs. Mrs. B. resigned from the YCL after six or eight months, and it was not alleged that she has since been in any way connected with Communism. Mr. B. was accused of disloyalty to his country.

Mr. C. had an acquaintance in college. The acquaintance, whom C. had not seen for 15 years, was named a defendant in a proceeding involving alleged Communists. In answer to an appeal made to most of his classmates, Mr. C. contributed some money to his friend’s defense. Although the friend was acquitted, Mr. C. was charged with disloyalty.

Mr. D. served as a civilian employe with the occupation forces in Japan. At a conference he suggested that in distributing fertilizer to Japanese farmers the occupation forces require that a certain percentage of the farmers’ produce be marketed immediately, through occupation channels, to stop hoarding. The senior Army officer at the conference asked Mr. D. if he were a Communist, and whether he believed in free enterprise. Mr. D. stated that he was not a Communist, that he believed in free enterprise, but thought that his suggestion would curb the black market. Shortly thereafter, Mr. D. was relieved and returned to the United States on a loyalty charge because of this incident.

It was reported to the FBI by an associate of Mr. E. that the associate had “heard” that E’s mother-in-law was pro-Russian. Mr. E. was charged with disloyalty.

These cases were not unique. They were, in Nikoloric’s words, ‘‘typical of the charges made in the generous sampling of cases with which I am familiar. Frequently , the employee, even after a hearing has been conducted is unable to determine njohy charges were ever preferred.”

No less extraordinary than the “evidence” on which Government employes were charged with disloyalty was the manner of their interrogation by the loyalty boards. Here, taken from transcripts of loyalty board hearings, are some typical questions addressed to Federal employes by the boards:

Are your friends and associates intelligent, clever?

Have you a book by John Reed?

There is a suspicion that you are in sympathy with the underprivileged. Is that true?

Was your father native born? . . . How about his father?

Do you think that the Russian form of Government is good for the Russians?

Are you in favor of the Marshall Plan?

How do you feel about the segregation of Negroes?

Did you or your wife ever invite a Negro into your home?

Would you say that your wife has liberal political viewpoints?

Were any of your relatives ever members of the Communist Party?

Did you ever attend any affairs with your wife where liberal views were discussed?

What do you think of the Italian situation?

Do you understand why the Catholic Church is opposed to Communism?

Suppose you should find out that your wife was a Communist, what would you do about it?

“Loyalty board ‘loyalty’ does not mean loyalty to America,” declared the former Assistant Attorney General, O. John Rogge. “It means loyalty to the bi-partisan foreign policy abroad, to segregation and the open shop at home . . . The loyalty cases are not directed exclusively or even primarily against the Communists. They are directed at the labor movement, and at those who share the intellectual and social bequests of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.”

In a book entitled Our Vanishing Civil Liberties, which was published early in 1949, Rogge recounts the details of some of the loyalty cases in which he acted as counsel for accused Government employes. One such case involved a Swedish-born mechanic named Charles Oscar Matson, who had been employed in the New York Naval Shipyard for thirty years.

In February 1948 Matson’s case came up before the Loyalty Board at the New York Naval Shipyard.

The Board, as Rogge relates, “soon got down to business”:

BOARD: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

MATSON: No, I have never been a member.

BOAP.D: Has your wife or any relative been a member?

MATSON: No, my wife is a church member. All she does is vote. Outside of that she doesn’t belong to anything . . .

BOARD: Do you ever recall attending a meeting of the American League for Democracy?

MATSON: I may have. I don’t know for sure. The name don’t even sound familiar.

BOARD: Did you ever attend meetings sponsored by the Saints and Sinners?

MATSON: What are they? Religious?

BOARD: No . . .

On questioning Matson about his reading habits, the Board learned he had once been a subscriber to the Literary Guild:

BOARD: What kind of books did they put out?

MATSON: They were supposed to be the best for the month.

BOARD: Did they put out books by Theodore Dreiser?

MATSON: Yes, I think-

BOARD: Feuchtwanger?

MATSON: I think there was one by Dreiser . . .

BOARD: Have you ever read any of Feuchtwanger?

MATSON: No.

BOARD: Howard Fast?

MATSON: I don’t know him. Never heard of him.

The Board proceeded to question Matson about his “political views”:

BOARD: Have you ever discussed the Truman Doctrine?

MATSON: Yes, a little bit.

BOARD: What do you think of it?

MATSON: Well, I went fifty-fifty on that.

BOARD: You aren’t settled on that?

MATSON: No.

BOARD: Neither for or against?

MATSON: No, I feel sorry for a lot of people over there and I feel sorry for people here. For instance, I will give you a case. They want packages. My daughter and myself gathered up some old clothes and instead of sending them over to the other side we sent them to the Indians. The Navajos or something . . .

Following Matson’s testimony, a number of workers from the naval shipyards were put on the witness stand by Rogge. “Witness after witness,” records Rogge, “declared that Matson had never said or done anything disloyal. Not one witness had an unkind word for him.”

One of the witnesses was asked by the Board if he considered Matson “to be a rather deep thinker.” The witness said he was not sure.

“Did you have any reason,” demanded the chairman of the Board, “to believe that he was fairly well read?”

Summarizing his account of the Matson case in his book, Our Vanishing Civil Liberties, Rogge writes:

I have the transcript of the Matson hearing before me now. It encompasses 95 single-spaced typewritten pages of testimony, every line of which is an indictment of Executive Order 9835. After the indignities of this hearing which was not even a competent imitation of justice, Charles Oscar Matson was fired.

Another loyalty case handled by O. John Rogge was that of George Gorchoff, an Engineering Material and Equipment Inspector in the New York Naval Yard. Unlike many of the individuals accused of disloyalty, who were not unnaturally bewildered and at a loss for words at their loyalty board hearings, Gorchoff turned out to be not only aggressive but extremely articulate.

The hearing had barely opened when this interchange took place:

GORCHOFF: In the charges here — this here — they specify that additional information will be given at the hearing, detailing these charges. Can I have that additional information at this time?

BOARD: This is an informal hearing. We have no additional information for you.

GORCHOFF: It so states in the letter that Admiral Haeberle sent me.

BOARD: That is incorrect procedure. . . . Any information that has been given to me in regard to this case has been given to us as confidential and cannot be divulged to you.

GORCHOFF: It is quite obvious that I can’t refute these specific questions without the people being brought here . . . For example, that I recruited people into the Communist Party.

BOARD: Did you or didn’t you?

GORCHOFF: Who said that I did.

BOARD: This is not a court of law.

GORCHOFF: I know, and I am not a lav^yer.

BOARD: This is not a court of law. You have been accused—

GORCHOFF: Have you— these people— the authority to exonerate me?

BOARD: No.

GORCHOFF: Who has?

BOARD: All we can do is submit a recommendation to the Commander of the Shipyard.

As the hearing progressed, Gorchoff continued to demand concrete information regarding the charges against him and to protest against the Board’s using as “secret evidence” the vague accusations of unidentified informers. “This is a hearing where I am attempting to prove my innocence,” protested Gorchoff. “In order to do that I have to have something … It is not only a question of a job, it is my life — 15 years of my life. While I was here I got married and had two kids. I am not a young kid flitting around looking for a job.”

At one point, when Gorchoff was requesting concrete information about one of his anonymous accusers, Rogge’s colleague, Robert Goldman, asked the Board: “Are you declining to give such information?”

“We don’t have such information,” answered the Board chairman. “We don’t know the name of the person.”

Rogge spoke up. “You merely have a statement without any proof?”

“It has been corroborated, checked and verified,” said the Board chairman.

“By whom?’*

“I can’t tell you.”

“By unknown parties?”

The Board chairman hesitated a moment. “Put it any way you like,” he then replied.

“Do you have an enemy who happens to be a government employee or a worker in a plant with a government contract? I will tell you how to dispose of him,” writes Rogge with bitter irony in Our Vanishing Civil Liberties. He continues:

Write a postcard to the F.B.I. Do not sign it. A signature would be a gratuitous gesture of courage … In this postcard state that your enemy’s wife read something by Theodore Dreiser, subscribed to the New Republic^ and once invited a Negro into her home . . .

Mail your postcard, and rest assured— your enemy is finished. The F.B.I, will conduct a secret investigation. Your enemy will end up before a Loyalty Board where your postcard will be vital but secret part of the evidence against him. He will not have the chance to face you, his accuser. He will have to defend himself against charges he has never heard. He may be fired. He may be allowed to resign. He may even be cleared. But in any case, he is a marked man.

He was once investigated for “disloyalty.”

The grim truth of Rogge’s observation was confirmed by an experience of Bert Andrews, Chief of the Washington Bureau of the New York Herald-Tribune and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for 1947.

While collecting material for a series of expose articles on the loyalty program, Andrews visited the State Department to check on the cases of seven employes who had been dismissed on charges of disloyalty. An informal conference took place between Andrews and three State Department officials. Andrews questioned the “decency and fairness” of branding an employe disloyal and dismissing him “without letting him in on the secret of who had accused him of what.” Was this, Andrews wanted to know, the American way of doing things?

Finally wearying of the discussion, one of the State Department officials blurted out:

“Why beat around the bush on a matter like this? It is entirely conceivable that any one of us in this room could be made the victim of a complete frame-up, if he had enough enemies in the Department who were out to get him.”

While Andrews listened with growing astonishment, the Department official went on: “Yes, such a thing would be perfectly conceivable. And we would not have any more recourse than Mr—,” he named one of the Department employes who had been dismissed — “even though we were entirely innocent.”

”What did you say,” demanded the astounded Andrews.

The State Department man calmly repeated his statement.

“If a man of your intelligence,” said Andrews, “can say a thing like that without being shocked at what you are saying and without a feeling of personal peril, then something is wrong.”

Not only in the nation’s capital, but throughout the length and breadth of the land, something very definitely was wrong in the United States.